Glider is a platform and consumer application for crypto traders, investors, and hobbyists to build and execute non-custodial trading strategies onchain. No code required.
State of Consumer DeFi
Onchain DeFi has been stuck at a local maximum. Swapping hasn’t fundamentally changed since Bancor/Uniswap. If anything, the consumer experience onchain has only gotten more complex: New chains and L2s to discover, understanding bridging nuances, different gas tokens, different token representations, manually swapping and mentally calculating and verifying price impact and slippage…the list goes on. It’s time to change that.
Thanks to recent infrastructure breakthroughs in account abstraction, permission/session keys, smart wallets, chain abstraction, and intents, the consumer application space is primed and ready for innovation. At Anagram, we believe the next step function of usability and user experience with DeFi onchain is now within reach. We’re now able to mirror the feature set and UX/UI of complex TradFi applications, while remaining non-custodial, onchain, permissionless, and ultimately orders of magnitude more efficient.
While infrastructure has historically been a category of focus amongst entrepreneurs and investors alike, we believe that more attention must be paid to the users. The idea for Glider was seeded from onchain transaction data, hands-on experience building and using trading systems, telegram bots, and a passion for combatting learning curves and making crypto easy.
Enter Glider
At its core, Glider is an onchain algorithmic trading platform with a unique twist. Users can create various strategies through an intuitive, no-code UI, and Glider takes care of the rest. It optimizes routes and executes strategies, all while keeping the process straightforward for users. These strategies can be shared, forked, and remixed, adding a collaborative element to the platform.
A core philosophy of Glider is meeting users where they are at. No new chrome extensions or special wallets to download and install. Simply come to Glider with any wallet and any tokens and let Glider handle the rest.
The User Journey with Glider
- Onboarding: Users visit glider.fi and log in using Sign-in-with-Ethereum, authenticating their wallet.
- Selecting (or building) a Strategy: Users can choose to start with a pre-built strategy – either shared from a friend, an influencer, or a curated strategy, or users can build their own via Glider’s proprietary Strategy Builder. A basic strategy may look like: hold 70% ETH and 30% USDC if ETH is above $3500, and adjust to 90% ETH and 10% USDC if ETH falls below $3500. Any token, across any chain, with extensible arbitrary logic can be introduced. Strategies react to market conditions automatically.
- Initializing the Strategy: When a strategy is initialized, smart vaults are lazily created across all major chains. These vaults programmatically handle rebalancing execution between assets and chains. All strategy creation is free – vaults do not cost anything to instantiate until they are utilized.
This is just a basic preview of some strategy "blocks". All strategy blocks can be recursively nested and combined. (E.g. you can have a conditional block inside a weight block and vice-versa; Nest several conditional blocks together to create scaling into a position, etc). Blocks are modular and follow a plugin architecture and can be extended, created, and added to via third party customizations.
Strategies are declarative in nature – unlike many imperative swapping flows today; Simply describe the 'what' your portfolio wants, and Glider handles the 'how'. Declarative strategies make excellent rebalancers, and rebalancers are great at originating solveable intents on and offchain. We expect to see more rebalancing applications as time goes on.
Starting a Strategy
- Funding the Strategy: Users fund the strategy by depositing a token of their choosing (generally ETH) into the vault with the new address. Funding a vault is equivalent to sending ETH to another EOA the user owns. Strategies are always owned by the individual user so vaults always stay isolated to a user – no commingling of funds ever.
- Signing Permissions: To start Glider for the strategy, a user will sign a scoped session key that allows Glider to operate on the smart account with specific permissions (e.g., buying and selling tokens listed in the strategy but not withdrawing funds). Glider never has direct access to user funds, only a very granular set of permissions to execute authorized, generated intents onchain to rebalance positions. Permissions can always be revoked by the user.
Vault Execution
- Evaluation and Rebalancing: Glider evaluates the strategy offchain at regular intervals and determines the current and desired states of the portfolio. The difference (Rebalance Diff) identifies the amounts needed to add or subtract to achieve the desired state. This intent is then sent to a custom-built solver, which maps out the optimal routes factoring in slippage, fees, and other variables.
- Execution: Glider builds the calldata for the routes and executes the intent, rebalancing the vault. Thanks to bundlers and paymasters, this process is gas-free for the user. Users can reconfigure the strategy at any time, deposit or withdraw funds, and Glider will adjust accordingly. When finished, users can withdraw their money from their non-custodial smart wallet into their main EOA/wallet.
Glider Launch
Glider has been incubating and is nearly ready for public use. We’ll be sharing more on Glider in the coming week or two. Glider is nearly feature complete; We’re currently finishing up an invite-only beta sessions and our marketing site (pardon our mess as we build in public!). While we finish up remaining engineering work, we will continue adding more users until Glider is generally available. In addition, we have a lot more exciting features and functionality on the roadmap – stay tuned! We’re excited for what we think is the next generation of DeFi consumer applications, and for Glider to set the new standard of what’s possible onchain.
Sign up to be an initial user of glider here
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